RFK Jr. says public health agencies are on the decline. Here are 5 ways they’ve improved your health.

By Jeffrey Kopp, CNN

(CNN) — US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. disparaged the department he’s been tasked with running in his appearances on Fox News this week, describing HHS as “on a 30- or 40-year decline” and calling the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “a broken agency.”

“When you look back, what would you say is the last great success that our government public health agencies have had?” “Fox and Friends Weekend” co-host Charles Hurt asked on Sunday.

“Well, I don’t think there have been successes,” Kennedy responded.

But career public health professionals and historians say he’s wrong.

“These are advances that take a lot of time to research and prove, and often help people who are already healthy,” Dr. Barron Lerner, a physician and historian of medicine at New York University, told CNN. “The accomplishments we can talk about are often on a population basis. They are proven over years and sometimes decades.”

Here are a few of the biggest ways public health agencies have improved people’s health.

Dramatic cuts to smoking rates

For decades, HHS — through the surgeon general, the CDC and other offices — has led campaigns to cut smoking rates. It began with the landmark 1964 surgeon general’s report linking cigarettes to lung cancer and culminated in 2009, when the US Food and Drug Administration was granted authority to regulate tobacco products directly.

Over that time span, smoking among US adults fell from about 42% in 1965 to just 12% today, according to an analysis of CDC data by the American Lung Association.

Medicare drug coverage for seniors

In 2003, Congress created Medicare Part D to cover outpatient prescription drugs, which had previously been excluded from Medicare benefits. When the program launched in 2006, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services — part of HHS — made the program work by partnering with private insurers, setting the rules for what drugs would be covered and how much people would pay, and running a national campaign to help seniors sign up.

Today, tens of millions of Medicare beneficiaries rely on Part D to afford their medications.

Breakthroughs in HIV/AIDS research

In 1996, a study funded by the National Institutes of Health discovered the breakthrough drug combination that transformed HIV from a death sentence into a manageable chronic condition. It found that a combination of three drugs reduced mortality by nearly half, and just a year later, AIDS-related deaths dropped 48%, according to CDC data.

Those achievements have been amplified globally by PEPFAR – the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, launched in 2003 by President George W. Bush – which has invested over $100 billion in the global HIV/AIDS response and helped save over 25 million lives, according to HIV.gov.

Covid-19 and Operation Warp Speed

One of the most recent improvements to public health came through the rapid development and rollout of Covid-19 vaccines under Operation Warp Speed, a signature achievement of the first Trump administration.

The NIH helped design and test the vaccines, the FDA reviewed and authorized them, and the CDC coordinated distribution and public guidance.

Vaccines typically take five to 10 years to develop, according to Johns Hopkins University, and sometimes longer. But Operation Warp Speed delivered shots within a year of the pandemic’s onset and is credited with saving millions of American lives, according to a study by the Commonwealth Fund.

Bridging the gap for childhood vaccinations

In the early 1990s, just 60% of children under 3 in the US had received the full set of recommended vaccines. To close that gap, in 1994 the CDC launched the Vaccines for Children program, which provides vaccines at no cost to pediatricians and clinics serving families who couldn’t otherwise afford them. By the end of the decade, vaccination rates climbed to nearly 90%, and the CDC estimates that the program has prevented more than a million deaths in children born since then.

Vaccine safety has become a central criticism of Kennedy, who in June fired all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the group of independent experts who make recommendations on childhood and adult vaccinations. The committee now has seven new members and is expected to get more soon.

“Anybody who has the privilege of serving in a leadership position in HHS is usually awed by the many achievements the agency has led,” Dr. Howard Ko, a professor of public health leadership at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who served as HHS assistant secretary under President Obama, told CNN. “He is setting back public health progress by a generation, at the very least, and that has got to stop. We are losing ground so rapidly, and it’s a tremendous concern for everybody in the public health community.”

An HHS spokesperson told CNN in a statement: “Secretary Kennedy has been clear: the CDC has been broken for a long time. Restoring it as the world’s most trusted guardian of public health will take sustained reform. … HHS remains committed to supporting the health of the American people while respecting their right to clear, honest information and personal choice.”

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